A New Tap on Yiddish Tradition

It is beyond ironic, but also maybe a little triumphant, that a new chapter in Yiddish music began with a creative encounter in Berlin--the seat of power, some 60 years ago, for the systematic and largely successful extermination of Yiddish-speaking European Jewry.

But then, says Frank London, trumpet player of the Klezmatics, “a good, healthy sense of irony abounds at every level” where contemporary Yiddish culture is involved.

After all, Yiddish revivalists like the Klezmatics are speaking up for the vitality of a language and a musical tradition that was nearly expunged through slaughter (during the Holocaust), through assimilation (the crux of the American Jewish experience) or through nation-building (the decision by Israel’s founders to discourage Yiddish and revive everyday use of Hebrew, the ancient language of the Jews that for nearly 2,000 years had been relegated to the synagogue and scholarship).

There is a little irony at play in “The Well,” the collaborative album between the Klezmatics, the New York City sextet hailed for its adventurous and eclectic approach in revitalizing Yiddish music traditions, and Chava Alberstein, a leading Israeli folk-pop singer with a similarly wide-ranging palette of styles.

Mainly there is a sense of haunting beauty, world-weariness and dreamlike reflection in the songs. The words are verses from the last generation of Yiddish poets who wrote in Europe; Alberstein set them to music, then turned the songs over to the Klezmatics, who provided a diverse set of arrangements that break down borders between the klezmer tradition, notable for its bittersweet swirl of fiddles, clarinets and brass, and the contemporary world of pop-rock song craft. The collaboration continues with a concert Saturday in Long Beach.

Berlin was where the Klezmatics and Alberstein, mutual admirers, first performed together seven years ago at an annual Jewish Culture Festival organized by the remnant of the city’s Jewish community. They enjoyed themselves and parted with the usual admonishment, “Let’s work together someday.”

“Someday” came last year after Alberstein sent the Klezmatics a cassette with only her voice and guitar, performing songs inspired by a 1995 documentary that she and her filmmaker husband made on aged European Yiddish poets still living in Israel.

The documentary was called “Too Early to Be Quiet, Too Late to Sing,” after a line in one of the poems. But Alberstein, 51, said she wanted to prove that it was not too late to sing in Yiddish and to enlarge the repertoire of Yiddish song.

She was born in Poland to Yiddish-speaking parents who fled the Holocaust and found harsh but lifesaving refuge in a Siberian labor camp, then returned to their home town to find that the rest of the family had been killed.

They emigrated to Israel when Chava was 4; she began her recording career in 1964 singing Yiddish songs. The hits that have sustained her career in Israel, netting numerous gold and platinum awards there, are in Hebrew.

But Alberstein continued to make a point of releasing an album of traditional Yiddish songs every five or six years, even though the audience for them is smaller than for her Hebrew material.

“Before [making the documentary] I only composed Hebrew songs, never in another language,” Alberstein said over the phone last week from her home in Tel Aviv. “I started with one [Yiddish] song, then it was like a little cave inside me was open.”

She set 30 poems to music.

“I didn’t think of any audience; I did not believe it would interest anybody,” she said. “The people who like Yiddish want to hear again and again the same [standard] songs.”

Then she thought of the Klezmatics as potential allies in bringing the songs fully to life and finding a public for them.

“It had to be done with people who can bring something unique and special to the project . . . people [who] without even speaking would understand what I mean.”

The enterprise found another passionate collaborator in producer Ben Mink, best known for his work with k.d. lang. The Klezmatics wanted Mink for what he had brought to lang’s sleek, moody recordings; after he signed on, they discovered that he had been raised in a Yiddish-speaking home in Toronto, the son of Holocaust survivors.

London, 41, said that some creative head-butting born of passionate investment in the music yielded an album that met the collaborators’ goal of sounding both authentic and up to date. “You can put it in a stack with all the albums you’re listening to, not just your klezmer records, and sonically it holds up.”

Yiddish music won’t ever be a mainstream pop taste, he acknowledged, but he sees room for doubling the 40,000 to 60,000 album sales the Klezmatics have come to expect with their five albums on independent labels.

Perhaps the most revealing assessment of Alberstein’s talent comes from producer Mink. Two months ago, he said, he was writing songs with k.d. lang at his Vancouver home, and he played the acclaimed Canadian singer a sad, dreamlike track from “The Well” called “I Stand Beneath the Carob Tree.”

“She almost fell off the couch,” Mink said. “She was just floored by how beautiful the voice was. [Alberstein] is one of the finest singers I’ve ever heard, period.”

Alberstein said she has had a presence in the U.S. since the 1970s, performing mainly in synagogues and on college campuses for the national Jewish student organization, Hillel. Her first American release (after almost 50 albums in Israel), the career-spanning “Crazy Flower: A Collection,” arrived only last year.

The material--striking not only for her voice but for the maturity of her lyrics’ imagery and adult takes on love--ranges from breezy New Wave-ish pop to moody French cabaret stylings to driving folk-rock. Alberstein says her influences include a wide assortment of American blues artists and folk-boom heroes, jazz singers and Jacques Brel.

As for “The Well,” she says that so far it is barely available in Israel. London says the American klezmer revival movement has met with indifference there, but he hopes that the collaborative album will mark a turning point.

“We played there once at a festival, but [klezmer] really hasn’t caught on,” he said. “These days, a lot of this kind of Yiddish music is associated with the ultra-orthodox, who in that country constitute a very strong right-wing political force. This album may be the thing that breaks the ice.”

* The Klezmatics and Chava Alberstein perform Saturday at Alpert Jewish Community Center, 3801 E. Willow St., Long Beach. 8 p.m. $45 ($30 each for groups of 10 or more). (562) 426-7601, Ext. 1024.